This investigation started with Rick observing some odd UDP traffic hitting his firewall. In this case, the traffic came from 66.55.158.116 port 3544. The destination port was a "random" high port. If you would like to provide your packet captures, see the end of this article for the right filter.

Port 3544 is assigned to Teredo. However, Teredo itself uses this port to establish connections, not necessarily for the actual Teredo tunnel traffic itself. As a host establishes a Teredo connection, it will connect to a Teredo server on port 3544 and negotiated the details of the connection. During this negotiation, a IPv6 address is established for the host.

The IPv6 address used by Teredo will always start with "2001:0000:". This /32 prefix is reserved for Teredo. It is followed by the IPv4 address of the Teredo server, 16 bits worth of "Flags" defining the type of NAT used by the client's network, the UDP port used to connect back to the client and finally the clients public IPv4 address. To illustrated this, here a more "graphical" representation of a Teredo address:

in short: Everything needed to connect back to the client is encoded in the IPv6 address. (also see our IPv6 tool )

The Teredo packet itself is rather simple. The IPv6 packet is embeded in a IPv4 UDP packet. We got an IPv4 header, a UDP header followed by the IPv6 header. Wireshark for example does a nice job in analyzing Teredo traffic.

Now lets go back to Rick's packet trace. If all this is true, then the last 4 bytes of the embeded IPv6 destination address should match the public IPv4 address the packet was sent to. In Rick's case, this wasn't the case. The two addresses didn't match at all.

The only packets Rick saw where "Bubble Packets". Bubble packets are used by Teredo to keep the firewall open. Typically every 30 seconds, the Teredo client will send an empty IPv6 packet to the server. This will extend the connection timeout in most firewalls. For UDP, there is no state like for TCP. In order to preserve the resemblance of state, firewalls assume that if a host sent a packet out, there may be a reply coming back. Teredo takes advantage of this "statefull UDP" feature in modern firewalls.

This is why we would like to connect more of these packets to see if Rick's experience was just a "one off" oddity or if others are seeing the same traffic. Rick did not use Teredo or IPv6 for that matter. We are interested in your packet in particular if you are NOT using IPv6.

You can use tcpdump or windump to collect the traffic. You probably have to collect the traffic outside of your firewall. The tcpdump line is not perfect, and may capture some other UDP traffic (e.g. DNS). Before you send it to us, take a quick look at it to make sure you are not sending us any confidential data.

As a reminder, the tcpdump command line to collect the traffic: tcpdump -c100 -s0 -i any -w /tmp/teredo udp port 3544

We got an e-mail today from Rick about some really odd UDP traffic he was seeing. We took a look and it looked like Teredo keep-alive traffic (IPv6 tunnels), but Rick wasn't running Teredo. It got some of the handlers wondering, so we're going to ask for packets from those of you who are NOTrunning Teredo (we don't really want to see your traffic, we're looking for anymore of these weird, apparently misdirected, packets). So, for those that are willing, could you run the following tcpdump command and upload the results to the contact page? We'll post our analysis in a week or two, if we can figure anything out. Thanx in advance.